Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Remembering David Currie

Constitutional scholar and historian David Currie, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, passed away on October 15 at the age of 71. He is remembered with great fondness at the Chicago Law School Faculty Blog, where you can leave comments, and in a detailed obituary on the law school website. I never had an opportunity to meet Professor Currie, but I benefited from his works, as will future generations of legal historians.

Here is an excerpt from the U of C website:

Professor Currie authored or co-authored three major casebooks on Federal Courts, Environmental Law, and Conflict of Laws. He is the author of numerous articles in legal periodicals as well as various books - including: The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany(1994) and Air Pollution: Federal Law and Analysis (1982).

Professor Currie is perhaps best known in academic circles for two series of books he wrote about constitutional history. The first, The Constitution in the Supreme Court, was published in two volumes (1985 and 1990), each about a century of the Court’s interaction with the Constitution. The second, The Constitution in Congress, appears in three volumes, The Federalist Period (1997), The Jeffersonians(2001), and Democrats and Whigs(2005). He was working on the series at the time of his death. [Amazon.com shows a fourth volume: Descent into the Maelstrom, 1829-1861(2006).]